Tate Taylor’s film version of The Help is basically 2011’s answer to The Blind Side (2009); however you felt about that movie – whether indifferent, aggressively hateful, grudgingly appreciative or tearful and inspired – is undoubtedly how you will feel about this one. Both are well-made, well-acted films that are also, at their heart, about noble white people who take a stand against the appalling racism of their friends in order to help strong, stoic, oppressed black people. In other words, like The Blind Side, The Last Samurai (2003) or Dances with Wolves (1990), it is a film about non-white people told almost exclusively from the point-of-view of white people. Read More

For twenty years now, ever since his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It in 1986, Spike Lee (b. 1957) has been one of the most innovative and provocative directors of his time. As expressed numerous times throughout his many films, Lee’s highest goal is to â€œwake upâ€ and uplift all oppressed and deluded people, but he has an understandably primary concern for his own people, the African-Americans who have been abused and misrepresented in the United States ever since before it was even called the United States.

Many critics have accused Lee of the same bigotry his films abhor, citing in particular three of his best films â€“ Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X and Bamboozled â€“ as being counterproductive and causing, rather than alleviating, the tensions between various races, but particularly between blacks and whites. Yet all one has to do is view these films to see Lee’s love of all humanity; each one of these films is an eloquent cry of pain at the inhumanity bred by racism in anyone, of any race.Â Read More